Directions: Read the following three passages. Summarize the main idea and the main point(s) of the passage in no more than 60 words. Use your own words as far as possible.

On an October afternoon last year, James Vernon, 76, was supervising a youth chess club meeting in a conference room in the Morton Public Library in Morton, Illinois. About 16 kids, aged seven to twelve, quietly faced off at two horizontal rows of tables, and James walked from pair to pair, overseeing the matches and offering tips. Four mothers sat off to the side, waiting for their kids to finish the weekly hour-long session.

Suddenly, a stocky teenager wearing glasses burst through the door at the front of the room JTm gonna kill some people!" he yelled.

At first, James, who was standing in the aisle between the tables, thought the bizarre sight was a Halloween prank, but then he saw the five-inch hunting knives that the teenager was holding in each hand. The teen, whom police later identified as Dustin Brown, 19, shouted incoherently and began cutting his left forearm with one of die knives. "As soon as I saw those knives and he started shouting, I knew this wasn't a prank/9 says James. UI thought I can't let something terrible happen."

James, a former computer-systems architect, spent 44 months in the US Army from 1962 to 1966. He had been trained in hand-to-hand combat, but he decided not to do that and to attempt to calm the boy instead by talking to him. "Hey, who are you?" “Where do you go to school? What's the problem?" James asked the boy. "Let's talk about this. I'll listen."

“My life is terrible, Dustin replied as he peered down at the floor and continued to cut his arm. While James talked to Dustin on one side of the room, Sandy Rassi, 40, the mother of three of the chess students, stood up on the other side. When she heard James say, "It's about time for these kids to head home," she motioned silently for the children to quietly leave the room one by one.

When Dustin finally looked up, he saw that the chairs were empty, and he lunged at James.

“I think he attacked me because I was the only one     left,”   says James.

Dustin swung the knife toward the man's neck and face, but James caught the blade with his left hand. With his hand bleeding, James continued to fight. He grabbed the necklace Dustin was wearing with his right hand and jerked him forward. Then James pinned the boy onto a table on his left side, hitting the right side of his collarbone with his uninjured fist. "I was trying to get him to drop the knives," says James.

It worked. Dustin let go of both weapons, and James kept the attacker under control until Morton police officers arrived a few minutes later.

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